How to Read a Film by Monaco James

Author:Monaco, James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2009-04-20T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 4-79. The Player, Robert Altman’s long-awaited return to form, proved an infectious satire on today’s Hollywood, rich with inside jokes but at the same time not dependent on them. Here studio exec Tim Robbins gets the message. (© 1992 Fine Line Features. All rights reserved. Photo by Joyce Rudolph. Courtesy New Line Productions, Inc.)

His films with Schwarzenegger (Twins, 1988; Kindergarten Cop, 1990) contributed to the depth of that star’s persona, and his political fable Dave (1993) skewered the fragile political consciousness of the 1990s. My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006) wittily explored the conventions of the super-hero genre.

Harold Ramis, who starred in and cowrote Ghostbusters, later went on to write and direct the 1990s landmarks Groundhog Day (1993) and Analyze This (1999).

Reitman and Ramis first made their mark with National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978, directed by John Landis), a film which not only presaged the Boomers’ fascination with their youth but also served as a model for contemporary comedy, depending as it did on the character of John Belushi. Reitman also worked with Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray, who, like Belushi, came out of the television program Saturday Night Live.

Indeed, most of the comic stars since 1980 began their careers on that seminal show, from Eddie Murphy and Billy Crystal to Dana Carvey, Mike Myers,* Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, and Chris Rock.

The show has been so surprisingly influential in American youth culture that for more than twenty years after it began, Saturday Night Live skits served as source material for full-length feature films (The Blues Brothers, 1980; Wayne’s World, 1992; The Coneheads, 1993).

While younger filmgoers were flocking to multiplexes throughout the 1980s and 1990s for their regular doses of virtual action, postmodern comedy, and sporadic myth, an occasional smaller theater in the ’plex was turned over to those of their elders who still left the house. The revolutionary excitement of the 1960s may have been a memory (celebrated to some degree in the latter-day art-house hit Cinema Paradiso, 1990), but the general level of quality remained high. We have already noted the continuing work of the generation of the seventies—Coppola, Scorsese, Alt-man, Mazursky. No filmmaker of the eighties—except perhaps Spike Lee—has received comparable media attention. This is not surprising; times were different. Since the eighties every colorless technician gets his name above the title, but the true age of the auteur has passed.

Although their artistic profiles may be lower, the eighties generation nevertheless established a reputation of its own. We’ve already noted the contributions of Reitman and Zemeckis to the youth mythology that Lucas and Spielberg constructed. Action directors like James Cameron and John McTiernan (Predator, 1987; Die Hard, 1988; The Thomas Crown Affair remake, 1999) also made their mark, thanks to their imaginative handling of special effects.

Jim Henson was just as influential in molding contemporary myths as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, although most of his work was done in television. When he turned to film with The Muppet Movie (1979), The Great Muppet Caper (1981), and The Muppets Take

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